Bohan Zhang
Member of Technical Staff @ OpenAI
Bohan Zhang is a member of the technical staff at OpenAI. Prior to joining OpenAI, he co-founded OtterTune, a startup specializing in automatic database tuning services. He has also been a speaker at various PostgreSQL conferences, including PostgresConf 2024 and PostgresConf Silicon Valley 2023. He also co-authored with Prof. Andy Pavlo the article "The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most," which critically examines PostgreSQL's implementation of MVCC, and is cited in the PostgreSQL's Wikipedia page.
POSETTE 2025 Talk
Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
PostgreSQL serves as a cornerstone of OpenAI's backend infrastructure, powering many of our most critical features. In this talk, I will share how we've taken PostgreSQL to the next level to handle OpenAI's demanding workloads on Azure. I'll cover the challenges we faced, the lessons learned from outages, and the strategies we implemented to scale Azure Database for PostgreSQL to handle millions of queries per second (QPS). Key topics include:
- Connection Pooling: How we effectively manage connection pooling with PgBouncer.
- Read Replication: Strategies for scaling read replicas to meet increasing demand.
- Schema Migrations and Long-Running Queries: Approaches to seamless schema migrations and resolving performance bottlenecks caused by long-running queries.
- Observability: Enhancing monitoring and observability to ensure reliability and performance.
Speaker
Interview
About the Speaker
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What is your favorite hobby?
My favorite hobby is snowboarding, and being based in Seattle makes it the perfect place for it.
About the Talk
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Tell us about your talk. Why did you choose this topic?
My talk is about how we scale PostgreSQL at OpenAI to support rapidly growing workloads and evolving product demands. I’ll walk through the key challenges we’ve faced—ranging from high query throughput and replication lag to schema evolution and operational complexity—and how we addressed them. Whether you're running Postgres at a startup or at large scale, I hope this talk offers insights and inspiration for navigating your own scaling journey.
About PostgreSQL
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If you had a magic wand, what single thing would you change in PostgreSQL as it is today?
If I had a magic wand, I would redesign PostgreSQL’s MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control). While it enables powerful concurrency features, the current implementation introduces significant challenges: high write amplification, costly index maintenance, table bloat, and the complexity of vacuum management.
About POSETTE & Events
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What other PostgreSQL events in 2025 are you excited about and why?
I’m excited for PGConf.dev 2025 this May—a great opportunity to connect with the global PostgreSQL community. I’m looking forward to meeting core contributors, learning about upcoming features, and diving into development challenges with fellow Postgres enthusiasts.
Join the conversation
Use the hashtag #PosetteConf